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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24373987">that cannot save</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bushwah/pseuds/Bushwah'>Bushwah</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>we the clay [21]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fake AH Crew (Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Cults, Alternate Universe - Grand Theft Auto Setting, Grief/Mourning, Gun Violence, Immortal Fake AH Crew, Libraries, Logistics, Los Santos, Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane, Mind Control Aftermath &amp; Recovery, Non-Consensual Bondage, Other, POV Second Person, Permanent Character Death, Police, Spiritual Abuse, Suicide, Suicide Notes, Suspense, Temporary Character Death, Tragedy, information security</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 00:46:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,727</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24373987</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bushwah/pseuds/Bushwah</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>You're alone in the room for a long time.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jack Pattillo/Original Character(s), Ray Narvaez Jr./Original Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>we the clay [21]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643119</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>that cannot save</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is an FPF fic based exclusively on the Fake AH Crew lore as set forth by Rooster Teeth Productions. This work owes an additional debt of thanks to Wren wrenseroticlibrary.tumblr.com and their collab partner Threatie alastair-made-me-undo-it.tumblr.com, posting collaboratively as Wrespawn on the AO3, for their contributions to the FAHC fandom.</p><p>All major characters in this series are abusive, in that they use abuse tactics in conducting their relationships. However, the degree of trauma they inflict depends on a variety of factors, within and outside their control. Abusive acts committed from a position of extreme power, such as Jack's control over the respawn machine (regarding the crew) or the other Fakes' access to it (regarding outsiders), are both particularly damaging and particularly unjustifiable.</p><p>There is graphic suicide in this fic. The text of a suicide note appears. If you are having thoughts of suicide, please tell someone. There are people who want to know so they can try to help. Real life does not have to be a tragedy.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You're alone in the room for a long time.</p><p>You've cried and struggled and whined. You haven't begged since you heard the outside door close. You know she can't hear you.</p><p>Your mind maps out the way to get to downtown Los Santos. Ray—you don't have the car key, so you'll have to hitchhike. You don't know how to find her, but if you go there, if you're visible enough, maybe she can find you.</p><p>She told you to come to her. She wants to see you again. That's the thought you cling to. You're going to get out, and you'll see her again.</p><p>You don't know how you're going to get out, either. You're puzzling on that when you hear the outside door open.</p><p>You perk up. It must be her, she's back, she wants you! But the footsteps don't come to your room. You recognize the sound of Ray going up the stairs.</p><p>Ray... There's something you were supposed to do about Ray. You can't remember what it was, though. You consider calling for him, but you have the vague feeling you'd scare him, so you don't. You hear the upstairs toilet flush, the quiet sound of Ray pulling up your desk chair.</p><p>You keep trying to remember what it was you were supposed to do—tell Ray something?—but it continues to eludes you all the way up until the gunshot.</p><hr/><p>In the horrible seconds after, several things become apparent.</p><p>You were overconfident. You thought you could restrain Jack, and you were wrong. Jack's victims will pay for it.</p><p>At some point Jack definitely did do the thing to you. You can't quite reconstruct the sequence of events, but you think you're the one who untied her, and you <em>know</em> you didn't fight when she tied you down in her place.</p><p>Somewhere in between, something else had happened. You shy away from the memory. It's not that it's unpleasant to think about. Quite the opposite, really. But...</p><p>“She hurt me,” you say, quietly, and the concept solidifies into a fact. “She hurt Ray, and she hurt me, and I <em>did not</em> consent.”</p><p>Ray... might not actually be dead. When you were talking about how to put Jack out of commission, and Ray had said that killing her wouldn't work, he'd told you that all the Fakes were immortal.</p><p>“In theory,” he'd said, “it's possible to... revoke it. Make someone mortal again. She never has, though.”</p><p>“How do you know?” you'd asked.</p><p>“She told me. The first time I tried to run away.” His gaze had been fixed on the grain of the table between you. “She... she asked me what I thought I was doing. Where I thought I was going. Told me no matter how long I stayed away, eventually...”</p><p>“You'd die,” you'd said, when it became clear he wasn't going to finish the sentence. “Eventually you'd die, and you'd be back there.”</p><p>“She <em>won't</em> have revoked it.” He'd looked up at you, and you'd seen in his eyes the desperation to make you understand. “That would be too easy.”</p><p>At the time, you'd talked him down from planning what was essentially a suicide attempt. Even if there was a chance it would result in him being alive in the Fakes' base, it wasn't worth it. The Fakes had added two new members since he'd left, bringing it to four against one even without Jack. And there was undeniably also a chance that the Fakes had chosen to remove that particular liability, which even Ray admitted he had no way of knowing until it was too late to go back.</p><p>So he's probably dead. You don't dare let yourself believe otherwise. If the immortality was stage tricks after all, if it depended on regular maintenance, if Ray didn't know Jack as well as he thought, if, if, if...</p><p>Ray attempted suicide, upstairs. He had a gun. You think—you hope, dangerous as it is—he might have failed anyway.</p><p>Outside, in the distance, you hear sirens.</p><hr/><p>The police come. They let you out—they cut the ropes, and you flinch without knowing why. They ask you questions: was he your boyfriend, did he do this to you, what did you hear, what had you been talking about last time you saw him.</p><p>It doesn't matter, you say, over and over again. It doesn't matter.</p><p>They don't arrest you. They do take the corpse—not Ray, it can't be <em>Ray</em>—and you feel oddly wounded by the loss, even though there was nothing, rationally, you could do with it. They also take the gun, or at least, by the time you get upstairs, you don't see it.</p><p>They don't take the note. They have to've read it, but it's there, folded up on your desk like Ray had just finished writing it and set it down.</p><p>You walk unsteadily to the desk and pull out the chair to sit down. The scraping on the floor catapults you back to before it happened. You stare at the paper. The folds in it are sloppy, rushed. Like he was in a hurry. Like his hands were shaking, maybe, like your hands are shaking now.</p><p>You unfold it, carefully. It's handwritten, clearer than his usual.</p><p>“I changed my mind,” it says. “I'm sorry to make you worry but you know why. If I was right you'll know soon enough. If you were right I love you.”</p><p>You have to pause to blink back tears.</p><p>“See you on the other side, dearest to my heart,” he had written. “In this world or in the world to come. I love you. I love you. I love you.”</p><p>It's signed at the bottom with a looping design of a rose.</p><p>You press the back of your fingers to it and kiss them, reflexive. Push the chair out and stand. You don't know where you're going, you just know you can't sit there in the place where Ray wrote those words for one more second. You glance around the room, your room, your computer pushed back on the desk, your bed with your blanket and your pillow and Ray's pillow next to it...</p><p>You don't want to be in this house. You're on your way downstairs when you freeze, realizing something else.</p><p>Jack knows where you live now.</p><p>Well, it's time to get out for more reasons than one, it seems. The car key is inside the spice rack, and you hold it to your chest for a moment before pocketing it. You check your go bag—Ray had insisted you pack one as you were first dating.</p><p>The gun is missing, but the bag of jerky, the two changes of modest clothing, the three ID cards for various identities, the token (Ray had said only “if someone in the city attacks you, try to show them this”), and the roll of twenties are still there. You add your phone and, after a second's hesitation, the note.</p><p>You drive to the gas station, and while you're there, you fix your phone: disabling fingerprint unlock, verifying that the cameras are properly covered, making sure location permissions are locked down and brute-force protection is on, and finally, enabling airplane mode.</p><p>If Ray's alive—if Ray's in the Fakes' base, right now—he's alone in enemy territory. Five against one.</p><p>You, God help you, are planning to make that five against two.</p><hr/><p>As you're driving into the city, you realize you don't actually know where the base is.</p><p>Not that you would attack it head on anyway. Thinking back, Ray probably hadn't told you specifically <em>so that</em> you wouldn't try that, and the last thing you want is to be used as a hostage against Ray. No, you just want to be nearby, in case he messages you and wants you to do something.</p><p>You're acutely aware that you don't actually know this place. You're deep in the enemy's territory, and you don't have Ray with you.</p><p>But one way or another, shit's going down. You stop and ask a tourist where the library is, citing a dead phone. There's no situation, however dire, that can't be helped by a librarian.</p><p>A tension in your body you didn't know was there unfurls as soon as you're through the library door. The reference desk is closed, but the checkout desk is open.</p><p>“Where could I find information about the Fakes?” you ask the woman running it. She gestures listlessly at a double-sided shelf with a faded label that reads <em>Local Interest</em>. You thank her, select a few promising volumes, and settle in to read.</p><p>Your hands itch with the desire to look up phrases. Still, you go through the print materials first. The Fakes have been active for six years. They have four known members, Wheels (<em>her</em>), the Kingpin (her husband, whom Ray called Geoff), the Vagabond, and a newer one, Mogar. Ray's aware of a fifth—unsurprising, given that this is public information and Ray has reasons to be following the Fakes rather more closely.</p><p>Then you log onto one of the Internet-enabled machines and start your search. Real multimedia. The knowledge of the world at your fingertips. It's almost enough to make you forget how dangerous it is.</p><p>A indeterminate time later, the lights above you blink. You tear your eyes away from the screen where Jack, in full mask and gear, is shooting down cops, and press the space bar to pause the video. A voice is talking over the PA system. “...or use a self-serve machine to check out your materials now. The library is closing in fifteen minutes. Thank you.”</p><p>You look down. On the screen, Jack is looking directly at you.</p><p>You start the video again, feeling outside your body. She brings the gun up and shoots you.</p><p>...The camera.</p><p>She shoots the camera.</p><p>You close the tab with a convulsive shudder and clear your browsing history before you log out of the computer.</p><p>Not sure what to do with yourself, you get your phone from the bag and connect it to the wi-fi at the library. The sound of a notification from your encrypted messaging app is loud in the silence, and you fumble for the mute even as your eye is drawn unerringly to the words.</p><p>
  <em>If you were right, I love you.</em>
</p><p>“He was right.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Isaiah 45:20.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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